Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

I wait till the song is over and then walk back on the beach. At night, the beach is even louder, all lit up with phone screens like fireflies in its darker corners, but mostly lit up from all the bars – so light it doesn’t matter that the sun is long gone. It’s still hot, only a few degrees cooler.

I see Bride. Even though she’s too far away and she’s as bald as dozens of other young women here, I recognize the walk, the gentle sway of the hips and the graceful half-bounce of her tall, boyish silhouette.

I shout, “Hey,” suddenly unsure about calling her by the fake name she’s given me. What a ridiculous thing, that name.

She comes closer, squints. “Hey.”

“How are you?”

“I’m great. How are you?”

“Great. I was wondering what happened to you.”

“What do you mean?” She tilts her head.

“I never heard from you.”

“Oh.”

“Well, no big deal. I had a crazy week.”

“Yeah. Well, it was nice to run into you,” she says and turns around and starts walking away.

“Hey,” I shout.

She turns around. “Yes?”

“What’s this about?”

“What’s what about?”

I say as lightheartedly as I can, “Nothing. I’m just glad to have run into you. Have a good night. Take care,” and I turn around.

I walk, half expecting to hear footsteps behind me, but when none follow, I decide that I will need to find a new girl tomorrow. This one is a glitch.

There’s a roller-coaster drop in my chest.

When I get to the beach house, I try to watch television. I flip through the channels like it’s my job. I can’t seem to find anything boring enough to get stuck on. I get up. I turn on my computer and look for clips with Belladonna. I jerk off.

I try to watch television again.

Next, I sit outside with Dog on the front steps, listening to the distant sounds of the beach, partying. The fresh air doesn’t help.

I go back to bed. I lie in bed for what seems like hours, trying not to think.

I get up to look in the trash to find the novel about the girl with leukemia. I have no other ways of putting myself to sleep.

Bride comes by in the middle of the night. I open the door to her quiet knocking and scratches. She slinks into my hallway and waits for me to invite her farther inside. It’s dark on the main floor except for the moonlight coming through the skylight.

I gesture for her to come closer and she does. She is silver, reflecting the moonlight coming through the skylight. We move softly, neither of us talking, and as we kiss, we do it quietly, without any sloppiness or panting.

THERE’S NO SINGLE DETAIL THAT I’M ABLE TO FOCUS ON. I want it all. The way her upper lip curls up even when she’s not smiling – like mine. The way her eyebrows are thick, dark slashes above those eyes. How her irises expand (coming below me, above me, next to me), how her eyes narrow, making me want to know what has upset her, where she has gone in her mind. (I don’t ask. Asking means losing control. But I want to ask.) Onward: her large nose, jutting forward; I like it. Her chin. The small dimple in it – why is even this negative space demanding I not look away? I can’t look away.

The freckles. Scattered gold that forms into a pattern but not a pattern at all; there’s too many of them.

Her belly, elastic and long; the pubic bone; the severely trimmed puff of curls; her pussy a wet, warm spot mapped out in pinkness and a tint of purple. Her pussy’s clicking softness.

Her feet with tendons fanning out as she walks, like strings of an instrument.

We stay in bed for a long time. I ask what her real name is. She says it’s Bride. She asks what my problem is.

“Bride?”

“Yes, Guy. Bride.”

I don’t ask again. I’ve lost enough control already. We talk. She talks. She talks about her love of films, especially the iconic violent blockbusters: Taxi Driver , Pulp Fiction , Natural Born Killers , Kalifornia, A History of Violence . She talks about the breakthrough scenes, the characters that made her feel invincible when she’d picture herself shooting a gun, destroying her enemies.

She says, “‘All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ’em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.’ Taxi Driver . De Niro.”

She’s good. I don’t know too much about acting, but she’s scary accurate, the accent perfectly New York, voice low and dry-mouthed, cheeks half-full of bagel. A little bit like the characters in The Sopranos .

“You’re funny.”

She says, “It was even worse when I was little because I would watch old Bruce Lee movies and think I could do karate. I’d go out and try to start fights with kids in the neighbourhood. They thought I was nuts. They would run away when they saw me coming.” She stretches, arms reaching for an invisible star above her, her breasts flat, the tiny nipples. “Mmmhmm, what else? Oh, I braided my hair like Princess Leia, even though I thought she was kind of lame except for the blasters, I guess. My dad was a huge Star Wars fan.”

I picture her, a slight child with big, serious eyes, the hair wrapped around her ears like wheels of silk. And her dad – her young-enough-to-like- Star Wars dad. What kind of dad is he? A dude in shorts with a long beard. Maybe he even owns a skateboard.

She tells me more about her past. It’s not a particularly fascinating childhood, but it sounds fascinating when she talks about it. She scrunches her forehead and puffs out her cheeks. She talks with her hands, shaping invisible contours of emotions accompanying stories about mundane events: friends’ breakups, a class trip where everyone got drunk, writing an essay about books on brainwashing – 1984 , A Clockwork Orange – and winning an essay contest with said essay.

I reach for her hand without thinking, just wanting to touch her. She pulls her hand back. I strain to laugh; can’t.

She talks about the small town where she grew up. Similar to the place I grew up except hers was poorer, a single-mom kind of place, a beat-up-sled-and-drunk-Santa-in-the-rainy-November-Santa-Claus-parade kind of place. A shut-down mall on the outskirts of town and a meth problem in a trailer park nearby. Four high schools, all four attended by Bride at some point because she had trouble with girls bullying her over her weird name and her childhood antics – the karate moves, the Star Wars hair. Her reputation followed her wherever she went – the reputation of having been bullied, of being the crazy kid – and she had to keep on moving.

“Then I just gave in and became crazy,” she laughs.

She graduated and moved to a larger city to study, but then a close friend had a serious accident. Bride dropped out of school. She’s not sure why – she wanted out and looked for any reason to justify it. So she told herself she quit out of solidarity and to take care of her friend. She won’t say if it’s a guy friend or a girl friend, but I guess from the tone of her voice that it was a guy. Was it drugs? Was she romantically involved with a junkie?

She rolls her eyes, “Good one.”